As many of you will remember, a very smart group of people–including Megan Phillips, Jefferson Bailey, Andrea Goethals, and Trevor Owens–helped the NDSA launched its Levels of Preservation guidelines in 2013. Since then, they’ve become a fixture in the digital preservation community, influencing practice and helping people make the case for robust infrastructure.

The original intent of the “Levels” was to create a set of recommendations for either preservation practitioners who were just starting out, or for those looking to deepen their preservation strategies.

Organized into five functional areas, the Levels helped frame many of our efforts as we moved forward with the work of digital preservation. Currently, those five functional areas are:

  • Storage and geographic location;
  • File fixity and data integrity;
  • Information security;
  • Metadata; and,
  • File formats

If you’re like me, you’ve likely used the Levels in one form or another to inform your work over the years. But with continuous changes in technology and practices, and–perhaps most importantly–after years of active use by the global digital preservation community, the NDSA would like to revisit the Levels to ensure they are still meeting the needs of digital preservation practitioners across a wide diversity of jurisdictions and organizational settings.

And that’s where you come in! The NDSA is undertaking a global survey to get a sense of how the Levels are currently being used (or not!) and how they might best be improved.

We hope you might take the time to complete the following survey and let us know what you think of the Levels, especially what you like most about them, and where they might need a rethink. And please note, the survey isn’t just for those people who are already using the NDSA Levels. If you don’t intend to use them or have decided they don’t meet your needs we are also interested in hearing from you.

Survey link: https://goo.gl/forms/nqFFZEhYpd7PiAHv2  

The survey will be open until Friday, February 22nd, and should take you between 10 and 15 minutes to complete. Your responses will be held in confidence.

For more information about the project, please see https://ndsa.org/working-groups/levels-of-preservation/.

If you have any questions about this survey or the project, please don’t hesitate to contact me as Chair of the Levels Reboot Project Implementation Subgroup, and we look forward to hearing from you!

Corey Davis

corey@coppul.ca

Digital Preservation Coordinator

Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL)

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